He’s also got a cat called Retweet…

It’s had the gestation period of an elephant, but at last Jonny Bentwood – proud father that he is – has unveiled his latest baby, and it’s called TweetLevel. All babies are beautiful to their parents, of course, but not all babies are beautiful. In fact in my experience most are ugly little sods (my own being the exception, naturally).

TweetLevel has been so long in arriving – and Jonny has been banging on about it so much during the pregnancy – that a decent number of his Edelman colleagues were hoping that the geeks might have invented the next big thing by now, causing Jonny to bang his fists on his desk, hot tears of frustration spilling down his cheeks. But no.

Having said that, if you read the small print of Jonny’s post about how TweetLevel works – and the comically complicated sum that powers it – you’ll find this bit:

Twitter Lists – without a doubt this feature addition to Twitter will significantly change the influence score. Even though Twitter has released their API to us, this particular metric is not yet included.

What this basically means is: “Oh, bollocks. Twitter lists screw up the maths, but there’s no way I’m doing it again now. We’ll sodding do without.”

Hey, but look, whatever. Jonny’s done a lot of work so that TweetLevel can tell you how influential you are. And popular. And trusted.

You’re not as influential, popular and trusted as Ashton Kutcher. Frankly, you’re probably not as influential, popular and trusted as Jonny Bentwood. But don’t let it get you down. Get angry. And take TweetLevel’s advice, pull up your socks and get yourself up the rankings. It’s the path to fulfillment (possibly also unemployment).

The TweetLevel press release has done it’s best to entirely undermine the worth of the tool by claiming that based on its findings, Labour would win a landslide at the next election. It also invents the word ‘Tweetatorship’, which undermines the value of the press release.

But that really makes the point, isn’t it? You might be influential on Twitter (at least according to TweetLevel), but the Twittersphere doesn’t represent the broader population. Not anywhere near. We’ve got to keep it all in perspective, and place Twitter within the context of all the other channels of influence. Like talking to each other. And television. And…ummm…well, talking and telly at least.

The truth is, of course, that the really influential people have got more important things to do than tweet.